Filmmaker Chanya Button with Elizabeth Debicki and Gemma Arterton from the film Vita & Virginia.

By Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images.

In 1922, Virginia Woolf met Vita Sackville-West—an aristocratic author and socialite who grew up in a manor home (containing 52 staircases!) that was given to her family by Queen Elizabeth I. Though both Woolf and Sackville-West were married to men, they embarked on a scandalously open love affair for about a decade that coincided with their best writing. Among the output was Woolf’s lauded novel Orlando, inspired by Sackville-West, about a male poet who becomes female at age 30 and lives for centuries. Orlando has been adapted for film, with Tilda Swinton playing the gender-bending role in 1992’s version from Sally Potter. And now, the love affair that yielded the feminist classic is getting its own close-up, from British filmmaker Chanya Button.

Button adapted the film from Vita and Virginia, a play written by and starring Dame Eileen Atkins. Atkins, the three-time Olivier-winning actress, is a Virginia Woolf buff who has played the ill-fated author on multiple occasions; she also wrote the 1997 adaptation of Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Decades ago, Atkins had written a film script for Vita and Virginia as well. When Button, who made her directorial debut with 2015’s Burn Burn Burn, expressed interest in the project, Atkins was happy to collaborate, inviting Button over for many “magical afternoons” at her home to talk Virginia Woolf. Speaking at the Toronto Film Festival, where Button debuted Vita & Virginia, Button said, “I had her and those conversations very much in mind the whole time we were making the film. Her generosity was incredible in really handing it over to me and saying, ‘Do what you think is right. Re-write anything you want. Put your stamp on it.’ So, the collaboration was intense but generous.”

In the costume drama, Elizabeth Debicki stars as Woolf, with Gemma Arterton playing Sackville-West. “I curated a reasonable but not-too-terrifying reading list,” said Button, who studied Woolf as an undergrad. But Sackville-West’s life, and her influence on Woolf, were newer subjects to take on.

“I had studied Orlando and knew that it was inspired by this relationship Virginia had with Vita Sackville-West, who’s a poet, aristocrat, and who was a famous kind of cad,” said Button. “She had so many lovers. But learning about Vita and her life was an incredible experience because she and Virginia were both incredibly unconventional women who were living in a way that was progressive, that would be progressive even for now.”

Vita & Virginia is just as unconventional as its subjects—a love story where the protagonist in emotional peril isn’t saved by either a man or a woman, but something deep within herself.

Courtesy of TIFF.

“Because [Woolf] had had a couple of serious breakdowns in her youth and continued to struggle with emotional and psychological challenges, everyone around her—her husband, her sister Vanessa Bell, her really tight-knit group of friends—presumed that this intense relationship with this woman who was notorious for having these big passionate romances and leaving people in her wake—that it would overwhelm Virginia and be a huge threat to her mental health,” explained Button.

“What the film is really about is a moment for Virginia when Vita did the inevitable and her attentions went elsewhere. Then Virginia’s genius arrives to save her. In a way, the film is very much about saving yourself, and her creative genius arrived to rescue her in a moment that everybody else presumed would overwhelm her.”

Button, who is just 31, jokes that she went to film school at Hogwarts. Before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, she worked as a production assistant on the Harry Potter franchise. “I was really young, and was making coffees and sweeping the floor, and sort of watching every department do their jobs—Stuart Craig, the production designer, amazing D.P.s like Eduardo Serra, and incredible hair and makeup designers like Amanda Knight and Lisa Tomblin . . . I had the privilege of observing all of that very young. I realized—as very lowly third A.D.—looking after actors like Helen McCrory and Helena Bonham Carter and Maggie Smith, waiting to take them to the set—I would hear them talking about a show they were going to do, and I realized I actually knew nothing about acting. But, I knew about literature, I knew about filmmaking. So I went to RADA and did the acting classes for a year, and rolled around in a leotard pretending to be a piece of seaweed.”

Vita & Virginia is a natural union of Button’s literature background, filmmaking experience, and desire to bring original, female-driven stories to the screen. Asked whether she encountered any obstacles getting a romance made about two women, Button said, “I hope people have this experience when they watch the film, but for us on set, we forget that it’s a love story between two women,” Button said. “It’s about love and inspiration and creativity and sexuality, and you sort of forget gender.”